Summary
Central Rivers AEA helps school leaders, instructional coaches and classroom teachers with this important strategy for improving instruction. Ask your regional administrator or any consultant how this process might be used as part of your continuous improvement cycle and/or professional growth plan.
Being in classrooms is one of the best ways to help systematically improve instructional practice. Too often, walk-throughs are seen as evaluation, a compliance check at best and a truly negative professional experience at worse. Creating a culture of trust focused on a growth mindset impacts the effectiveness of any feedback. Because of the variation in their use, the research can be somewhat varied, yet themes emerge. We know there are some critical features of walk-throughs that can make some big impacts:
- Determine the purpose and communicate it.
- Why are you doing walk-throughs? What are you looking for?
- Be transparent by creating/using a tool that everyone has access to and knows about.
- High Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM) often have a look-fors document or a checklist for lesson planning that can be converted into a rubric.
- Co-create a form with teachers in your building based on your annual instructional goal
- Establish tight/loose for the logistics.
- length of time in the classroom,
- Will you ask students questions?
- Will there be notes taken? What will happen to those notes?
- Determine how the data will be used
- Will teachers get individual feedback?
- Will the whole staff see the system level results?
The other interesting point that emerges from the research is that walk-throughs are often more of a learning opportunity for the person doing the walk-through than the person who is receiving the feedback from the walk-through. Teachers want to see and learn from other teachers.
Idea 1
Learning walks can include teachers and administrators (using the features listed above) to observe instruction and discuss what they learned. If a school has access to substitute teachers, 2-3 subs could cover the teachers’ classrooms that are doing the learning walks rotating classrooms every 90 minutes or so to allow for 60 minutes of observation time and 30 minutes of debriefing on what they learned and are going to try in their own lesson planning. The leader could share those take-away ideas with the whole staff for transparency and highlight strengths noted. If needing a rubric around general instructional practices, consider TNTP’s Core Teaching Rubric for a transparent tool to use with staff.
Idea 2
Have teachers trained to collect information that the staff wants to focus on. For example, if having students understand the learning target for the day is the goal of the staff, teachers could develop a process that a colleague or instructional coach could use throughout the building on a specific day to collect information toward that goal. How many classrooms has learning targets posted? When asking 3 students what they were learning, how many could respond? Instructional Practices Inventory (IPI) has a similar approach and the research behind this approach shows a relationship to improved student outcomes.
Central Rivers AEA helps school leaders, instructional coaches and classroom teachers with this important strategy for improving instruction. Ask your regional administrator or any consultant how this process might be used as part of your continuous improvement cycle and/or professional growth plan.
Have a question? Please reach out to Jen Sigrist, Executive Director of Educational Services.